The Rape of Nanking: Questions Answered

The mass killing, rape, looting and burning by Japanese troops after they took Nanjing, then China’s capital, on 13 December 1937. For about six weeks they executed tens of thousands of disarmed soldiers and men taken for soldiers, killed civilians, raped women and girls on a vast scale and burned about a third of the city. Read chapter 1 →

The city fell on 13 December 1937, and the Tokyo tribunal found the crimes continued for at least six weeks. Historians date it differently: Hata Ikuhiko from 13 December to early February 1938, Kasahara Tokushi from 4 December 1937, when the armies entered the Nanjing municipality, to 28 March 1938. Read chapter 1 →

The same city. Nanking is the English spelling used in 1937; Nanjing is the modern pinyin form. This collection uses Nanjing for the city and keeps Nanking in period names: the Nanking Safety Zone, the University of Nanking, “The Rape of Nanking.” Read chapter 1 →

Fighting at Shanghai began on 13 August 1937 and lasted about three months. Japanese landings behind the Chinese flanks at Jinshanwei (5 November) and Baimaokou (13 November) turned the withdrawal into a rout, and the road west to Nanjing, about 300 km away, lay open. Read chapter 1 →

Not at first. The General Staff set a restriction line near Suzhou on 7 November 1937. Lt. Gen. Yanagawa Heisuke crossed it on 19 November, Gen. Matsui Iwane pressed Tokyo on 22 November, and the formal order to attack came only on 1 December, after the divisions were already on the way. Read chapter 1 →

Gen. Matsui Iwane led the Central China Area Army from 7 November 1937: the Shanghai Expeditionary Force (under Lt. Gen. Prince Asaka Yasuhiko from early December) and the 10th Army (Lt. Gen. Yanagawa Heisuke). Of more than 160,000 men, roughly 50,000 made the assault (Askew). Read chapter 1 →

Yes. Killing, rape, looting and burning were reported along the whole route from Shanghai; near Changzhou on 29 November, for example, about 80 villagers were machine-gunned, an event known partly from a Japanese army doctor’s diary. Some town figures rest on postwar testimony, but the pattern is not seriously disputed. Read chapter 1 →

Four Japanese newspaper articles (30 November–13 December 1937) reported two second lieutenants, Mukai Toshiaki and Noda Tsuyoshi, racing to kill 100 people with the sword; the last gave 106 and 105. Noda later said he had killed only four or five in real combat, and historians conclude most victims were prisoners. Read chapter 1 →

Most of his generals and his German adviser Falkenhausen advised against it, since the city had the Yangtze at its back. Chiang judged that giving up the capital and Sun Yat-sen’s tomb without a fight would damage his government while he hoped for foreign help, and Tang Shengzhi volunteered to hold it. Read chapter 1 →

The Hunanese general who volunteered to defend Nanjing and was appointed garrison commander on 25 November 1937, with orders to hold “at any cost.” He had about 73,790–81,500 men (Askew). His withdrawal order of 12 December came late and reached only some units; he crossed the Yangtze that night. Read chapter 1 →

About a million lived there before the war, but most left. Askew estimates 200,000–250,000 civilians remained (best estimate about 224,500), plus a garrison of 73,790–81,500. Iris Chang’s higher figures of 600,000–700,000 cannot be reconciled with the counts made at the time. Read chapter 1 →

On the morning of 13 December 1937, after a general assault begun at 13:00 on 10 December. The Tokyo tribunal found that “all resistance had ceased” as the Japanese entered, so those killed in the following days were not killed in battle. Read chapter 2 →

Yes. On 9 December 1937 aircraft dropped Matsui’s summons calling on the Chinese command to send envoys to Zhongshan Gate to arrange a handover. Tang Shengzhi did not reply, and at 13:00 on 10 December Matsui ordered the assault. Accounts differ on the deadline stated in the leaflet. Read chapter 2 →

Estimates run from about 20,000 to 150,000. Askew’s unit-by-unit study gives 73,790–81,500, the best-documented figure; Hata gives about 100,000 and Kasahara about 150,000. About 16,000 raw recruits were pressed in just before the fall. Read chapter 2 →

The 6th and 114th Divisions attacked Yuhuatai and Zhonghua Gate from the south, the 9th Guanghua Gate, and the 16th Purple Mountain and the eastern gates. The Yamada Detachment moved along the Yangtze to Mufushan, the Kunisaki Detachment crossed to Pukou, and warships pushed up to Xiaguan. Read chapter 2 →

Tang’s plan, sent just after 17:00 on 12 December with a breakout set for 23:00, told most units to break out south and east. Many never received it or left without passing it on; only a few formations, notably the 66th and 83rd Corps, tried, and most of the garrison fled north toward the river. Read chapter 2 →

Soldiers and civilians converged in the dark on the half-open gate to the river port of Xiaguan. Hundreds were crushed or trampled; the uninformed 36th Division fired into parts of the crowd, and at about 21:00 a tank drove into the press. Durdin and Steele reported bodies piled several feet high. Read chapter 2 →

No one knows. The river was about a kilometre wide, few boats remained, and Japanese patrols and warships fired on boats, rafts and swimmers on 12 and 13 December. No one counted and the current carried the bodies away; many of those trapped on the bank were later captured and killed. Read chapter 2 →

Askew gives 1,558 Japanese killed and 4,619 wounded, excluding the Yamada Detachment. Chinese combat deaths are hard to separate from the later executions: estimates range from 6,000–10,000 (Sun Zhaiwei) to 50,000 (Hata) and 70,000 (Jay Taylor). Read chapter 2 →

On 17 December 1937 he rode in a victory parade along Zhongshan Road with Prince Asaka and the senior commanders; he had stayed in the rear during the assault, reportedly ill. The Tokyo tribunal noted his “triumphal entry” while mass executions were still going on. Read chapter 2 →

No one counted, and no figure can be proven. The Tokyo tribunal found over 200,000 murdered in six weeks; the 1947 Nanjing tribunal and China give over 300,000; Japanese scholars range from 13,000–19,000 (Itakura) and about 40,000 (Hata) to 100,000–200,000 or more (Kasahara). The dispute is over scale, not whether it happened. Read chapter 3 →

They count different things: civilians only, or prisoners and soldiers too; the walled city or the whole municipality with six rural counties; six weeks or four months. They rest on different evidence, from burial ledgers to unit reports and surveys, and must fit a city of about 200,000–250,000 civilians. Read chapter 3 →

The army had no plan for prisoners, and an Army Ministry notice of August 1937 said the conventions need not be applied strictly in China. Lt. Gen. Nakajima Kesago’s diary for 13 December records a policy of not taking prisoners; Maj. Gen. Yamada Senji’s records the reply to his request for orders: “kill them all.” Read chapter 3 →

That is an allegation, not an established fact. Ono Kenji and Iris Chang argue such an order went out under Asaka’s authority; others attribute it to his staff officer Lt. Col. Chō Isamu. No written order has been found and no court so found. What is certain is that the prisoners were killed. Read chapter 3 →

The Yamada Detachment took the surrender of a huge crowd near Mufushan on 14 December 1937; Yamada’s diary counts 14,777. Diaries of the 65th Regiment, collected by Ono Kenji, record that most were machine-gunned on the riverbank on 16–17 December. Estimates run from about 14,000 to 20,000 killed. Read chapter 3 →

Chinese postwar testimony describes a mass killing of prisoners there on 18 December 1937. A survivor, Lu Su, deposed that 57,418 died, a figure the 1947 Nanjing tribunal accepted. It rests on one witness and cannot be tested; that a very large massacre took place on that stretch of river is not in doubt. Read chapter 3 →

Japanese units searched the camps for soldiers in civilian clothes, picking men by calloused hands, strap marks or age, and marched them off to be shot. The 7th Infantry Regiment’s own report records 6,670 executed in the zone, 13–24 December. The IMTFE found more than 20,000 men of military age killed this way. Read chapter 3 →

Mostly along the Yangtze north and west of the city: Xiaguan, Meitan harbour, Mufushan, Caoxiexia and Yanziji, where bodies could be pushed into the current; others lay outside Taiping, Hanzhong and the western gates. The IMTFE found over 30,000 prisoners machine-gunned at the riverside. Read chapter 3 →

Charities presented counts of more than 155,000 bodies at Tokyo: about 43,000 by the Red Swastika Society and 112,266 by the Chongshantang. The Red Swastika ledgers are generally accepted; the Chongshantang figures are widely doubted, and Askew puts genuine burials near 17,500. Bodies burned or put in the river appear in no record. Read chapter 3 →

The only systematic count made at the time, a household sample, recorded 2,400 civilians killed by soldiers in the city and 4,200 taken away, mostly presumed killed, and 26,870 killed by violence in the rural counties surveyed: more deaths outside the walls than inside. It missed soldiers and wiped-out households, so it is a minimum. Read chapter 3 →

Looting began on the first day and was systematic; Durdin reported that virtually every building was entered. Organized burning of the commercial districts went on for weeks. About a third of the city was destroyed by fire, with damage estimated at US$20–30 million in 1937 values. Read chapter 3 →

A survivor who was eight on 13 December 1937, when soldiers killed seven of the nine people in her household at No. 5 Xinlukou; John Magee filmed the house soon after. When Japanese writers said her story was invented, she won libel judgments in China (2006) and Japan (2009). Read chapter 3 →

Yes, and they are among the strongest evidence: the Nakajima and Yamada diaries, the 7th Infantry Regiment’s report, soldiers’ diaries and servicemen’s photographs. In 1985 the veterans’ association Kaikōsha, whose project many hoped would refute the massacre, acknowledged large-scale unlawful killing and apologized. Read chapter 3 →

Five stayed through the fall: Tillman Durdin (New York Times), Archibald Steele (Chicago Daily News), C. Yates McDaniel (Associated Press), Leslie Smith (Reuters) and Arthur Menken (Paramount). They left on 15 and 16 December; Steele’s first report appeared on 15 December and Durdin’s on 18 December. Read chapter 3 →

Historians combine four explanations: no provision for prisoners and a policy that did not protect Chinese captives; a campaign of heavy losses, revenge and plunder since Shanghai; an army in which brutality was passed down the ranks, with contempt for the Chinese; and a failure of command. None was accepted as an excuse in court. Read chapter 3 →

The phrase was coined for the whole catastrophe of the occupation, but it was chosen because of one crime in particular: the mass rape of the city’s women and girls. The Tokyo tribunal used it to title its section on Nanjing, and Iris Chang’s 1997 book made it widely known. Read chapter 4 →

The Tokyo tribunal concluded that “approximately 20,000 cases of rape occurred within the city during the first month of the occupation,” a postwar judicial estimate for the city and that month only. Other estimates run to 80,000 (Iris Chang). The full total, including the countryside and later months, is unknowable. Read chapter 4 →

Women and girls of every age. The IMTFE found “even girls of tender years and old women” raped in large numbers; the Ginling diaries record a girl of 12 seized at the gate and women over 60 assaulted. Many were killed afterwards, as were relatives who tried to protect them. Men were also assaulted. Read chapter 4 →

Ginling, an American-founded women’s college inside the Safety Zone, was set aside for women and children. Minnie Vautrin, Tsen Shui-fang and their Chinese staff sheltered about 10,000 at the peak, around 22 December 1937, on a campus built for a few hundred, and kept its gate through the winter. Read chapter 4 →

An American educator (1886–1941) from Secor, Illinois, who taught at Ginling College from 1916 and ran it through the occupation. Her diary is one of the fullest Western records of the massacre. Exhausted, she broke down in 1940 and died by suicide in Indianapolis on 14 May 1941. Read chapter 4 →

Tsen Shui-fang (Cheng Ruifang, 1875–1969), Ginling’s dormitory director and nurse, was 62 in 1937. Her diary, kept in Chinese and hidden from the soldiers, is the earliest known day-by-day account of the massacre by a Chinese resident; UNESCO inscribed it on its Memory of the World register in 2015. Read chapter 4 →

Soldiers demanded to search the campus. Vautrin was slapped when she refused to open a door, and the staff were held at the front gate while women were taken out through a side gate: twelve in Vautrin’s diary, eleven girls in Tsen’s. Both recorded the night independently, in two languages. Read chapter 4 →

Officers with a senior military adviser asked to pick out 100 “prostitutes” from the refugees for a licensed house for soldiers. Vautrin reluctantly allowed the selection; 21 women were taken and she refused the other 79. The diaries do not record what became of the 21. Read chapter 4 →

On 11 December 1937, Yoshimi Yoshiaki found, the Shanghai Expeditionary Force’s chief of staff recorded receiving documents on setting up comfort facilities, justified as a way to prevent rape. The system that grew held women from Korea, China and elsewhere for years; researchers count over 40 comfort stations in Nanjing. Read chapter 4 →

The largest surviving comfort-station complex in Nanjing, about 4,800 square metres of brick buildings on a lane in the old city. In 2003 Pak Yong-sim, a Korean survivor held there from 1939, identified her building. Saved from demolition, it became a museum of the system in 2015. Read chapter 4 →

A survivor (1918–2004) who, 19 and six and a half months pregnant, resisted soldiers in the Safety Zone and was stabbed many times (usually given as 37 wounds); John Magee filmed her in hospital. In 2002 a Tokyo court found that a Japanese author had defamed her, a judgment upheld through 2005. Read chapter 4 →

A refuge of about 3.86 square kilometres in northwestern Nanjing, set up by Western residents in November 1937, where most remaining civilians sheltered: about 250,000 by the committee’s estimate, in 25 or 26 camps and in houses. It did not keep the army out, but most historians agree it saved many thousands of lives. Read chapter 5 →

The International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone, formed on 22 November 1937 with John Rabe as chairman and Lewis Smythe as secretary. Askew counts 22 Westerners who stayed (14 Americans, 5 Germans, an Austrian, 2 White Russians); hundreds of Chinese staff and volunteers ran the daily work. Read chapter 5 →

In the northwest of the walled city, bounded by Zhongshan Road, Shanxi Road Plaza, Xikang Road and Hanzhong Road. It took in the University of Nanking and its hospital, Ginling College, the American embassy and the new residential district. Older accounts round its area to about 4 km² or 2 square miles. Read chapter 5 →

From Shanghai, where the French Jesuit Robert Jacquinot de Besange opened a neutral zone in Nanshi on 9 November 1937 that sheltered about 250,000 people. In Nanjing, Mills, Bates and Smythe drafted a plan on 17 November; Jacquinot’s zone was later a precedent for the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949). Read chapter 5 →

No. Japan never formally recognized it. From 14 December 1937 soldiers entered at will, took away men suspected of being soldiers, raped women in the camps, looted and set fires. The zone reduced the danger; it did not remove it. Refugees were ordered home by 4 February 1938. Read chapter 5 →

It cannot be measured. The claim that it “saved 200,000 to 250,000 lives” equates everyone who sheltered there with those who would have died. The record shows that danger in the zone was lower than where no foreigners were present, that the camps fed tens of thousands, and that witnesses restrained some soldiers. Read chapter 5 →

From 14 December 1937 to 19 February 1938 Lewis Smythe wrote 69 letters to the Japanese embassy, with numbered reports of killings, rapes, looting and arson, about 450 by early February. Published in 1939 by Hsü Shuhsi, they became evidence at Tokyo and remain the core contemporary record of the zone. Read chapter 5 →

They ran most of it: the secretariat under Tang Zhongmu, housing under Wang Ding, food under Han Xianglin, sanitation, police and burial teams. They faced dangers the foreigners did not: about 135 zone police were seized on 17–18 December, and district head Wang Xinglong was killed on 28 December. Read chapter 5 →

About 20 km northeast of the city, the Dane Bernhard Arp Sindberg and the German engineer Karl Günther flew their countries’ flags over a cement plant and opened it to villagers, with a makeshift clinic. Estimates of how many sheltered there range from about 6,000 to 20,000. Read chapter 5 →

On 28 January 1938 camp leaders were ordered to send refugees home, with a deadline of 4 February. On 18 February the committee renamed itself the Nanking International Relief Committee, for relief only. Rabe left later that month, and the last camps closed in May and June 1938. Read chapter 5 →

Robert O. Wilson (1904–1967), born in Nanjing to missionary parents, was for weeks the only surgeon operating in the city, at the University Hospital. His letters home are among the most exact contemporary records of the injuries inflicted, and he testified at the Tokyo tribunal on 25–26 July 1946. Read chapter 5 →

A University of Nanking sociologist and the Safety Zone committee’s secretary. He wrote most of its 69 protest letters, filing, the Tokyo tribunal noted, “two protests a day for the first six weeks,” and in 1938 directed the War Damage survey, the only statistical count of the losses made at the time. Read chapter 5 →

A Hamburg-born Siemens manager (1882–1950) who ran the firm’s Nanjing office from 1931 and joined the Nazi Party in 1934. As chairman of the Safety Zone committee he confronted soldiers in person, sheltered about 600 refugees in his garden and kept a diary of more than 800 pages. Read chapter 6 →

Rabe joined the party in China and in Nanjing used its symbols deliberately: a swastika flag in his garden and his standing as a German made Japanese soldiers back off. His conduct does not redeem the party, and his membership does not discredit his diary, which agrees with independent records. Read chapter 6 →

He tried. In Berlin he lectured from May 1938 and wrote a report to Hitler commonly dated 8 June 1938 (Yale says it was never sent). The Gestapo detained him; after Siemens intervened he was released, but his film was confiscated and he was forbidden to speak or write about Nanjing. Read chapter 6 →

They stayed with his family for nearly fifty years. In 1996 Iris Chang traced his granddaughter Ursula Reinhardt in Berlin, and the diaries and the report to Hitler were made public. A German edition edited by Erwin Wickert followed in 1997 and the English The Good Man of Nanking in 1998. Read chapter 6 →

German advice to Chiang Kai-shek began with Col. Max Bauer in 1927 and continued under Wetzell, Seeckt and Falkenhausen. Germany supplied arms and training in return for raw materials, above all tungsten, under the HAPRO barter treaties of 1934 and 1936; about 80,000 Chinese soldiers received German-style training. Read chapter 6 →

What was left of them. The 36th, 87th and 88th Divisions and the Training Brigade had been bled at Shanghai (the 87th alone lost over 16,000 men) and refilled with recruits. At Nanjing they held the southern and eastern gates; the 88th lost three of four regimental commanders on 10–11 December. Read chapter 6 →

Legation secretary Georg Rosen, back in Nanjing from 9 January 1938, sent Berlin a copy of John Magee’s film with a report that, in one archive’s summary, called the Japanese army a killing machine and asked that the film be shown to Hitler. Whether Hitler saw it is not known. Read chapter 6 →

In 1938. Hitler announced recognition of Manchukuo on 20 February; arms deliveries stopped by April; Falkenhausen and his officers left Hankou in early July. Tungsten trade continued for a time, but on 27 September 1940 Germany, Italy and Japan signed the Tripartite Pact. Read chapter 6 →

He was destitute in bombed-out Berlin and had to go through denazification; he was cleared in June 1946. In 1948 the people of Nanjing raised about US$2,000 for his family and sent food parcels into 1949. He died in West Berlin on 5 January 1950 (Yale gives 1949). Read chapter 6 →

Rabe’s home at Xiaofenqiao No. 1, on the Gulou campus of Nanjing University, where hundreds of refugees lived in his garden. Restored with German support, it opened on 31 October 2006 as the John Rabe and International Safety Zone Memorial Hall. Read chapter 6 →

On 12 December 1937, about 28 miles (45 km) above Nanjing, Japanese naval aircraft sank the US gunboat Panay, which had evacuated the last embassy staff, and attacked three Standard Oil tankers. Four men died: two sailors, a tanker master and an Italian journalist; 43 sailors and 5 civilians were wounded. Read chapter 7 →

Japan called it a mistake. But the ship flew large American flags, Tokyo had been told her position, and newsreel film showed low-flying aircraft. US Navy historians record that pilots were told to attack “any and all ships” above Nanjing, and Japan admitted that army launches had machine-gunned the survivors. Read chapter 7 →

Roosevelt demanded an apology, compensation and guarantees. Japan apologized formally on Christmas Eve and on 22 April 1938 paid $2,214,007.36. There was little appetite for more: on 10 January 1938 the House only narrowly, 209 to 188, shelved the Ludlow Amendment requiring a referendum before war. Read chapter 7 →

Not as it protested the Panay. Washington obtained redress for American lives and property but made no comparable demand about Nanjing. The slapping of the diplomat John Allison by a Japanese soldier on 26 January 1938 drew more American coverage than many reports of Chinese deaths. Read chapter 7 →

Footage shot on a 16 mm camera by the Episcopal missionary John Magee from December 1937, mostly of wounded patients at the University Hospital and of places where families were killed, with his own captions giving names, ages, dates and places. Yale calls it the first available visual documentation of the massacre. Read chapter 7 →

In January 1938 George Fitch took a Japanese military train to Shanghai with eight reels of 16 mm negative sewn into the lining of his coat (sources give 19, 20 or 23 January). Copies were made in Shanghai; one set went to Germany, and Fitch showed another across the United States. Read chapter 7 →

A good deal. Durdin and Steele reported the mass executions in December 1937; Timperley’s What War Means compiled the missionaries’ accounts in 1938; on 16 May 1938 Life published ten frames of Magee’s film. Knowledge did not move policy against isolationism and the Depression. Read chapter 7 →

Yes. The United States sold Japan about 1,777,000 tons of scrap in 1937, 73.4 per cent of its scrap imports, and roughly two-thirds of its petroleum imports in 1939. Curbs came in steps, from the 1938 “moral embargo” to the scrap embargo of 1940 and the oil embargo of August 1941. Read chapter 7 →

Murata Shigeharu, one of the aviators who attacked the Panay, led the Akagi’s torpedo bombers at Pearl Harbor. More broadly, the war in China led to the American embargoes of 1940–41, and Japan’s refusal to withdraw from China was the issue on which the 1941 talks broke down. Read chapter 7 →

The surgeon Robert Wilson (25–26 July 1946), the historian Miner Searle Bates (29 July) and John Magee (15 August) testified in person; Lewis Smythe gave an affidavit and James McCallum’s diary was entered. The American assistant prosecutor David Nelson Sutton assembled the Nanjing case. Read chapter 7 →

Six men were executed. Gen. Matsui Iwane and ex-Foreign Minister Hirota Kōki, convicted at Tokyo partly for failing to stop it, were hanged on 23 December 1948. The Nanjing tribunal shot Lt. Gen. Tani Hisao on 26 April 1947, and Mukai Toshiaki, Noda Tsuyoshi and Tanaka Gunkichi on 28 January 1948. Read chapter 8 →

The Tokyo tribunal acquitted him of aggressive war and convicted him only on Count 55, disregarding his duty to prevent war crimes. It found that he knew of the atrocities, had the power and the duty to control his troops, and “did nothing, or nothing effective, to abate these horrors.” Read chapter 8 →

As Foreign Minister he received reports of the atrocities, raised them with the War Ministry and, the tribunal found, “was content to rely on assurances which he knew were not being implemented,” which it called criminal negligence. He was the only civilian sentenced to death at Tokyo, and the verdict is much contested. Read chapter 8 →

Asaka, who commanded the Shanghai Expeditionary Force when the city fell, was a member of the imperial family and Hirohito’s uncle by marriage. Under MacArthur’s policy of shielding the throne and its family he was never charged. Interrogated on 1 May 1946, he denied knowledge; he died in 1981. Read chapter 8 →

That about 20,000 rapes occurred in the city in the first month; that over 20,000 men of military age and over 30,000 prisoners were killed; that burial societies counted more than 155,000 bodies; and that over 200,000 civilians and prisoners were murdered in six weeks, an estimate it did not break down. Read chapter 8 →

A military court of China’s Nationalist government, set up in 1946 under the Ministry of National Defense. Unlike Tokyo it sat where the crimes happened, took depositions from hundreds of survivors and exhumed mass graves at Zhonghua Gate and Yuhuatai. It could try only men extradited from Japan. Read chapter 8 →

From the Nanjing tribunal’s 1947 verdict on Lt. Gen. Tani Hisao of the 6th Division, summarized as over 190,000 killed in group massacres plus over 150,000 in individual killings. It became China’s official figure; historians such as Wakabayashi question its arithmetic and its single-witness components. Read chapter 8 →

The principle that a commander is criminally liable for subordinates’ crimes he knew or should have known of and failed to prevent or punish when he could. The Matsui and Hirota verdicts applied it at the highest level; it is now in Additional Protocol I (1977) and Article 28 of the Rome Statute. Read chapter 8 →

Critics cite judges only from the victors, no jurisdiction over Allied acts, the shielding of the emperor’s family, retroactive aggressive-war charges and loose rules of evidence. Many legal historians accept the procedural objections; they do not touch the factual record of the massacre, which rests on far more. Read chapter 8 →

The Indian judge Radhabinod Pal would have acquitted every defendant, but his view of Nanjing is often misreported. He accepted that atrocities were committed there; he disputed parts of the evidence and, above all, the liability of the accused for crimes they had not ordered. Read chapter 8 →

Mainly the Safety Zone letters and case reports, the diaries of Westerners who stayed, burial records, diplomatic reports and Chinese testimony. Many Japanese army records were burned in August 1945, and perpetrator diaries now seen as decisive, such as Nakajima’s, surfaced only decades later. Read chapter 8 →

The Government of Japan does not. Its Foreign Ministry says “it cannot be denied” that the killing of noncombatants, looting and other acts occurred, while calling the number hard to determine. A denial school exists and some politicians echo it, but it has never persuaded Japanese historians and has lost in court. Read chapter 9 →

The Foreign Ministry’s statement on Nanjing contains no separate apology; it recalls the “deep remorse and heartfelt apology” of Prime Minister Murayama’s 1995 statement on the war, upheld in 2005 and 2015. Japan apologized formally for the Panay, and in 1985 the officers’ association Kaikōsha apologized. Read chapter 9 →

Organized denial began with Suzuki Akira’s 1973 book calling the massacre an illusion (maboroshi). Tanaka Masaaki, Matsui’s former secretary, called it a fabrication in 1984 but was shown to have altered Matsui’s diary in several hundred places. Courts found that Higashinakano Shūdō had defamed Xia Shuqin. Read chapter 9 →

On the core events, largely yes. Specialists corrected some points: a 1938 telegram’s 300,000 was Timperley’s figure for the whole Shanghai–Nanjing campaign; her population (600,000–700,000) and death toll (260,000–350,000) are above most non-Chinese estimates; some photographs were misidentified. None of this changes the central facts. Read chapter 9 →

An American journalist (1968–2004) born in Princeton, New Jersey, whose The Rape of Nanking (21 November 1997) spent about ten weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and helped bring Rabe’s diaries to light. After severe depression she took her own life in 2004; her statue stands at the Memorial Hall. Read chapter 9 →

It is the subtitle of Chang’s 1997 book. Survivors, Nanjing and Japanese scholars never forgot; what faded was Western public memory, overtaken by the wider war and the Cold War, when Japan became America’s ally and neither Chinese government made Nanjing a priority. Read chapter 9 →

At Jiangdongmen in southwest Nanjing, on a mass grave known as the “pit of ten thousand corpses.” The Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders opened on 15 August 1985 and has been greatly enlarged. Admission is free with advance registration. Read chapter 9 →

On 27 February 2014 China’s legislature designated 13 December, the day Nanjing fell, as National Memorial Day for the victims. The first state ceremony was held at the Memorial Hall on 13 December 2014; each year sirens sound across the city and traffic stops. Read chapter 9 →

In October 2015 the “Documents of Nanjing Massacre” joined UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register: records from 1937–38, the files of the Nationalist postwar investigation and tribunal (1945–47), and People’s Republic court records (1952–56). Japan protested. Read chapter 9 →

Very few; all were children in 1937. The Memorial Hall’s register listed 24 in December 2025, and 22 after Xu Deming died on 2 January 2026, aged 96. Their testimony has been recorded since the 1980s, and from 2012 with the USC Shoah Foundation. Read chapter 9 →

Since the 1982 textbook dispute they have generally mentioned it, with varying wording on numbers. The historian Ienaga Saburō fought textbook screening for over thirty years; in 1997 the Supreme Court held that ordering deletion of passages on the rapes at Nanjing, among others, was an abuse of discretion. Read chapter 9 →

Some images circulated in 1938 and later were misidentified, and historians have corrected them. The core visual evidence has secure provenance: Magee’s film, captioned at the time; the “Shame” album copied from Japanese soldiers’ negatives; and photographs by Japanese servicemen. Read chapter 9 →

The Memorial Hall at Jiangdongmen; the John Rabe House; Ginling’s buildings on the Suiyuan campus of Nanjing Normal University; Zhonghua Gate and much of the Ming wall; the rebuilt Yijiang Gate; riverside stelae at Yanziji, Caoxiexia and Mufushan; Yuhuatai; and the Lijixiang museum. Read chapter 9 →